"The Sheik, then," said I, after a block or two. "It was he who ushered me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it."
In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.
I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared, would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure sc.r.a.ping across the board.
I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no longer in doubt and I stopped.
"Ha!" said I, aloud. "You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?"
The automaton was silent.
I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, "Can you write?"
The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.
"Not only can write, but is anxious to do so," I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.
For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I a.s.sumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature"s red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing.
Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed!
I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his gla.s.s eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.
I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then, hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned, crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the lines of wax figures--the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes--into the sunlight.
No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik had written, "You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and never see the old man or child of his again!"
Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.
"Come," said I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night"s experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim of superst.i.tious fear."
This determination immediately cleared my reason. After all, there was nothing to solve.
"Whoever controls the mechanism has seen me with the Judge," said I, "and doubtless has heard him mention his daughter, and perhaps has observed the effect of her name on me. Furthermore, he, or, as the Judge said, the man or woman behind the Sheik, has even seen me with Julianna and might well have drawn conclusions. The message was written in ill temper or as a piece of malicious mischief. And there"s an end to it!"
Whereupon I tore the sc.r.a.p across the middle and, dropping it in the gra.s.s, I started toward my home.
The picture of that writing, however, was too clearly photographed upon my vision; it continually wrote itself on the walls of buildings, upon the pavement or across the sky. And as it did, little by little, it began to dawn upon me that the handwriting with which it had been executed I had seen before.
When at last, from the back of my mind, I recalled the occasion, I astonished those persons who were walking near me by stopping in the middle of the sidewalk as if stricken and uttering a sharp exclamation.
My hand sought the contents of my inside coat pocket; among the papers there I found the note which Julianna, wishing me to see her father, had written me, and with trembling fingers I spread the sheet before me.
One look was all that was necessary, for it sent me hurrying back the way I had come; it was enough to cause me to kneel down on the gra.s.s in the gathering gloom that was filling the old square. Where I had sat a half-hour before, I now searched frantically for bits of torn paper.
I found both pieces at last, placed them side by side and compared them with the note in my hand. I have already told you that Julianna wrote a hand distinguished from others by subtle peculiarities. The message from the Sheik was written as she would write!
To believe, as I found I must believe, that she, with or without the knowledge of the Judge, would so far forget the obligations of her place in society as to operate a vulgar puppet in public, no matter how much it might interest or amuse her, was another shock to me. I am free to confess that, in spite of all my former a.s.sertions to myself that I had not loved her as much as I had supposed, this new development was the first that began to make me believe I had been blinded by mere infatuation.
"You have been moving in the dark," I told myself. "You have stifled your senses from a whole set of facts which tend to show that some unwholesome thing is sleeping on the threshold of the Colfax home.
Perhaps, after all, Julianna and the Sheik of Baalbec are right. It has come out for the best."
And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It brought back to me my love for her. I remembered my promise to the Judge. I recalled her tenderness and purity, which I had felt so strongly that I had expected to see it about her like an effulgence. I cursed myself for doubting her. I looked upon the evidence of the sc.r.a.p of paper in my hand as a piece of testimony brought against an innocent person. Not only with the instinct of a lover, but that of a lawyer as well, I determined to defend her from my own accusations.
I had not been without the necessity, once or twice in my practice, of calling upon experts in handwriting; now I remembered that one of them, a clever fellow named Jarvis, lived in an apartment not far from mine.
It was the dinner hour. I believed I should find him and I was right.
"I have come on a peculiar errand," I explained to him as he appeared in his library, napkin in hand, "and if you are not through dinner, I will wait."
"No, no," said he, with easy falsehood. "I had just finished. How can I help you, Mr. Estabrook?"
"I wish your opinion on two pieces of handwriting," I answered. "It is unnecessary for me to tell you where I got them, you understand. The question at issue is, did one person write both, and if not, is one of them an imitation of the other?"
He flourished a powerful reading-gla.s.s in the professional manner those fellows use and gave the two specimens a cursory examination.
"The problem should not be difficult," he said, "since both were written hastily. In the case of the pencil, it is clear from the manner in which the fine fibres of the paper are brushed forward like gra.s.s leaning in the wind. In the case of the ink, the wet pen has gone back to cross a t or complete an imperfectly formed letter before the earlier strokes had time to dry."
"That would preclude imitation?" I asked.
"Why, yes. Offhand, I should say so--unless the one who made the attempt had practiced for years, or has the skill of imitation developed beyond that of any professional forger. But give me a moment, please."
I waited, tapping with my fingers on the chair arm.
He straightened up at last, with a sigh, then looked at me with his eyebrows drawn and a look of perplexity on his thin, cadaverous face.
"It"s very odd," said he.
"What"s very odd?"
"Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years apart--at different periods of life, were they?"
"Why, no," said I.
"They are not the work of one person, then," he said, with firm conviction. "I would stake my reputation on that."
"Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?" I said, stifling a glad exclamation.
"That"s the rub," said he. "And, to be frank, I might spend a month without being able to say which was the imitated and which the imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which, merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever seen."
You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This outcome of my adventure with the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit, made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in condition to receive that which was about to befall me.
CHAPTER IV
THE FACE
My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely a.s.serted to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.